What information a Technical Program Manager (TPM) needs to drive a project through to completion

I’ve recently been challenged by my Amazon manager to increase my capacity to be able to manage more projects at once. I’ve been concurrently managing around 1 large software project and then around 2-4 medium to smaller projects. Increasing my capacity means identifying the important, high leverage tasks and focus on driving those tasks and eliminate the rest. In another way, what’s the 80/20 for driving a project?

In order to identify those tasks, the following questions need to be answered:

What has been critical in helping me to deliver previous projects?

What have I been able to leverage accomplish more with less time/effort?

What do I wish I had in the middle of previous projects?

Based off the brainstorming of those questions, I came up with the following:

User Roles

Who is the target user(s) for this project?

What are the properties of these roles?

What problem(s) is this going to solve for these groups?

What this helps with?

This helps me to be able to play the part of the User when needing to make design decisions.

Once I have these defined, it’s fairly easy to drive the project forward. All of these need to be updated and groomed, sometimes on a daily basis, but doing so is usually doesn’t require too much effort.